WD VelociRaptor 600GB: Fastest Hard Drive Ever

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Test System and IOMeter

Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a different hard disk used for the OS and benchmark installations. The drives were left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO and Vantage benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test.

In the following tables, we're showing two sets of IOMeter access patterns running on our test drives; one with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and one with IOMeter's default access pattern of 2K transfers, 67% reads and 100% random access.

Western Digital's new 600GB VelociRaptor is the fastest of the hard drives tested here, with only the 300GB VelociRaptor puttin up similar numbers. Response times were unexpectedly high, but in terms of IOPS and data transfer rates, the VelociRaptor crushed the competition.